This bullshit was basically my first experience with Windows 11 when I got a new PC last year. Literally, "Why is my internet so slow? What's this OneDrive thing? Oh, holy shit fucking stop Jesus Christ!"
Just automatically started uploading everything on my hard drive to an account I didn't set up, without even a prompt telling me it was happening, and no obvious way to make it stop. I didn't even know Windows had added a cloud storage option. I actually had to completely uninstall OneDrive to finally make it stop.
I might have liked having a native backup service in Windows if it was like, "Hey look at this handy cloud storage tool we've added to Windows! Would you like to pick some files to save?" But as it is, it might as well just be another piece of spyware.
There's a big long list of reasons why I hate Windows 11, but this OneDrive shit is the thing that's making me think maybe it's time to ditch Windows for good.
While we're sucking up every single file, let's also do daily, non incremental backups
We'll hit the free storage limit it no time and then we can start sending DIRE messages about how the users data won't be PROPERLY backed up anymore.
Then we can upsell them in an outrageously priced storage plan that won't even last a year of these daily backups so we can start the process over again.
Thankfully I noticed what was going on before it got to that point, but when they start vacuuming up all your files and data like that without telling you and without giving you control over it, you kind of have to assume that whatever is going on is not being done for your benefit.
It'd be hilarious if they did that but your paid for space was too low so they had to cut you off but they had already taken the liberty to delete the files before they synched
Mean while on windows 10, they are forcing updates with a creepy splash screen when you boot up. Can't exit, can't stop it, basically held hostage. This was on my old surface pro 4. Then the update screwsed everything up and I had to do a system restore....shits bad 👎
Been running Windows 10 on my gaming desktop for a while now and refusing to "upgrade" to 11 because of how much worse it was. Going to be doing a hardware refresh in a couple months and when I do I'm installing Linux. Thanks to Valve and a few major open source projects Linux gaming has finally reached a point where I can tell MS to fuck off with their enshitification.
My computer doesn't support Win11, so I have that going for me. Transitioning to the Steam Deck for my gaming, which has been a slow but mostly positive process. Some of the games don't play well outside of Windows, but none of the ones I really want to play, and I can always switch to my computer if I do.
What’s the big deal? Microsoft security is top notch. They totally didn’t get p0vvN3d by russia basically twenty minutes ago and have their source code stolen.
It’s why the US gummit is so happy to use micro$quash services.
And y’know even then, who cares if all your data is stolen by state-sponsored cyber crime groups, y’know? M$ has spared no expense to ensure all that data is secured end-to-end with unbreakable encryption even microsoft can’t read! (snkk) Even if they wanted to!
It’s not like they’ve tricked everyone into being data cattle for their giant cloud-ranching operation, to shovel everything into AI and sell the results to anyone at the highest price possible. I mean. We’d have heard something about that if it was the case.
To be fair, the DOD uses a different version of Windows than you, me, or any average company, with a custom set of agreements with Microsoft, a bunch of debloating of Windows-specific apps and the addition of a bunch of military/government apps.
I don’t know that to be true, but if so why has the history of Windows been a continual string of vulnerabilities, hacks, and weak security such as their own cloud service being compromised and their codebase stolen?
That is, if there’s a DoD “version” that’s more secure, couldn’t they make more money selling that? I dunno, they’re dead to me but they’ve never been short of people who want to use them for whatever reason.
Because DoD isn't concerned with the regular internet or unclassified machines as much as with the classified computers - those set up by Information Technician ratings and the Security Managers to handle SIPR and JWICS access. The Admirals, Generals, and O-6s are also often tech illiterate old men, and those just beneath that, and the E-7+ crowd, are often just as tech illiterate. Microsoft also has a lot of multi decade DoD contracts, which they get billions for. Microsoft can't sell the secure version because that just lets foreign adversaries reverse engineer all the possible vulnerabilities. Microsoft only cares about security as far as they get paid for it and can get away with. In the consumer market, that's pretty much zero concern - not profitable enough.
I mean specifically a cloud storage account. Setting up the computer required me to supply an email address and set a password for microsoft.com. There was nothing in that process that I recall mentioning OneDrive, or that would have suggested every file on my C drive was about to be indiscriminately uploaded to a Microsoft server somewhere. I didn't even know OneDrive was a thing until I had to google how to stop it.
I was having a conversation in another thread a few days ago about the legality of completely fictional AI child porn and how that may be a safer outlet for those individuals as it involves no harm.
It's legal in many countries, but also not legal in many countries.
In the USA, federal law says as long as its not obscene or has serious value its allowed, but really, good luck with those clauses. Then it says, it's also legal unless it's been transmitted by a common carrier, e.g mail, internet.
So, someone might be legally making their own CP so they don't need to cause any abuse, and then Windows without their permission, uploads it to OneDrive.
You know the person making fictional CP would be the one thrown in jail for transmitting it over a common carrier, but maybe we should throw Microsoft in jail for doing that without permission and fucking us all over, over and over and over again with all this bullshit
They're literally stealing your files. They're probably training their AI on anything uploaded to OneDrive. It's not like they even prompted you or gave you the ToS.
"fictional AI CP" isn't a thing. AI is trained on existing data. It does not create new stuff. If you want AI to generate CP then you have to train it on CP.
AI can create faces and bodies that have never existed. From there it might just take a lot of prompt engineering, but to say you have to train it on CP is false.
Edit: Also that's only considering life like CP. There's the whole cartoon/manga side of things which IS purely fictional at all times but will get you sent to prison if transmitted over an open carrier.
Can create faces that have never existed, but can you guarantee that the child in a CP that it has created does not look identical to a child that already exists? after all it can very well produce something using children directly from or very similar to its training set.
yea well there is no way to guarantee that AI wont spew out CP where the child there looks exactly like a child that it has seen in its training set, i.e a child that really exists. so no go
Oh god, you reminded me. I had a run in with this recently because my parents got new laptops. 1TB hard drive, should be plenty right? NO! My mom had 15GB of files in her home folders and One Drive was whining constantly to pay them for more space.
It was about an hour of debugging to keep the files safe, extract One Drive from the home folder locations because it had dug in like a virus, and then (after 20 online searches and scouring forums) click the specific toggle in the specific menu to disable One Drive so it would use local files.
I paid for a 1TB computer, why are you forcing me to use your shitty online-only limited-space shit show. Fucks sake.
In my company they legitimately try to convince us that our users love ads.
I conducted user research on one of our websites, which showed complaints about the amount of ad placements we have been throwing at them. The execs responded by telling me "but we are actually HELPING them, we're showing them products that will improve their productivity and processes". Then, they came up with ideas for new ways we can place MORE ads on top of the ones already there. I'm sure our users are loving it!
It’s more like the execs know that ad revenue is a significant chunk of the revenue stream and cost very little to implement so they’ll keep growing that until it starts measurably impacting other revenue centers in the org
You should tell them that if users love ads so much, you should add a slider to let people control how many ads they get. Surely they'll only increase the ad count, right?
On a related note, YouTube just gave me a pop-up advertising premium again, only this time the cancel button was "No, I like ads."
I was gonna sit back and watch an hour of YT (with ads) but that pop-up rubbed me the wrong way and I didn't watch anything so that I might skew the A/B test in favor of no dark patterns.
Sounds like what happened when Windows 8 came out. Oops I meant Windows Vista. My bad, I'm thinking of Windows Me. Sorry, I might have it confused with NT 3. Everyone loved Windows 2.0 right?
98 Second Edition was 'da bomb at the time :) Much more stable than Win95, and not yet phoning home like XP. I get nostalgic seeing the splash screen.
After that, I switched to Win2K, as the last windows that did not phone home - and then straight to Linux, a decision I have never regretted and will never regret.
I once turned that feature on thinking it was an actual backup (copies of my files in the cloud), I remember how angry I was when I found out it wasn't a backup after all and just removed your files from your computer and only made them accessible online.
They made it the default option for businesses that routinely buy computers with less local storage than their users need. Pretty much every company I have worked for.
They then pushed it out hard into the consumer market when SSD came out and the average storage space on lower end models dropped by 75%.
I see why they did it, how they did it was in usual Microsoft fashion, idiotic.
It's sort of their pattern.
Introduce new changes.
Screw it up royalty.
Fix the features that are salvageable and revert most of the remaining except: Double down on the shitty ones that they think will make them more money.
It is possible to keep individual files on the local hard drive with different settings (that in my experience never seem to stick past updates).
The default, though, is to take everything on your computer off of your computer, put it into the cloud (their computer), and recommend you pick and choose which ones stay on your computer. In essence, they want you to think of your computer as secondary to their computer. An extension of it.
There is no "your computer", it's just the computer you happen to be logged into at the moment.
The cloud is not something you take advantage of, the cloud is where you live now.
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Nah you'll have to download a half-english app, sign up on a website you haven't heard before, request BIOS access code, wait up to a month and then you can do that
Aren't there already? With vendor splash screens and all the graphics in the BIOS settings menus? Why don't I get paid every time Asrock gets to display their logo on my monitor at boot?
I work with Windows as a requirement of my job, I'm in IT and I'm constantly in and out of the bowels of the operating system. I have a lot of thoughts on this stuff.
My first thought is, stop moving everything around. Even in Windows 10, if you're using an older version, say 1804, and you switch to a newer version, say 22H2, stuff is moved all over the place. It makes it super hard to direct someone blindly to the control they need to click to get something done. You're making my job much harder than it needs to be. Stop it. There's no reason to move this crap around.
To bring out my grumpy old man routine: back in my day, if you wanted to do anything, you went to the control panel. Everything you needed was there. Now it's in settings, no wait, clicking on this settings option for that thing now launches an appx thing that, surprisingly (/s) is broken.
Too many damn times have I tried to open their damned settings app or the new defender security appx dialog simply crashes. The solution is almost always dkim online repair. Well, if it needs repair so damn much, how about you just repair it for me as part of system maintenance? The fuck.
Windows 11 is a special form of suffering. Right clicking on a file and.... What the fuck is this? I basically click on "more settings" every time I right click. And the changes to the settings application.... Don't get me started.
Also, why in the fuck do we have copilot installed by default now? You're an operating system, stay in your goddamned lane.
The only good thing I can say about Windows 11 is that it has really good security. So good that I frequently have trouble doing routine things. Today, I was trying to run a PowerShell script and it told me some bullshit error, which is pretty common for PowerShell. After googling the error, the recommendation was to change the execution policy. I went to do that at an administrative PowerShell prompt and it told me that I didn't have access to change it. While running as the administrator. Yay. Shit is broken again. Fuck me I guess. I'm off to unfuck my less than five month old new work system because Microsoft can't get their shit straight.
Customization options do not and cannot help me. 90% of the time I'm working on someone else's computer, so I have to fucking deal with the default behavior because I'm not going to change it for 500+ users whom I support. I'm pretty sure I'd get more than a few complaints. So I have to fucking deal with whatever hairbrained decision Microsoft made about what should be default.
Windows 10 had its own share of bullshit. One of my most common annoyances was the way the OS decided to install fucking candy crush, every fucking time a new user logged into the goddamned computer. It's like playing whack-a-mole, but not fun and filled with uninstalls. I hope Microsoft made some good money on that brand deal, because I sure paid for it with my frustration.
After all of this, I keep finding myself in the fucking registry, and thank God that's one thing that hasn't been fucked over by their new UI team. I keep having to fix dumb issues by injecting registry keys so I can not deal with the stupid UI all the goddamned time. It's hacky, and I'm happier for it.
I could keep going. Pretty much every decision they've made in the past 5 years has been some measure of bad. The only thing I've agreed with them doing is finally ending internet explorer. Begrudgingly, edge is better, but not by a lot, IMO.
The last thing I'll say is that the tpm bullshit is going to give me an aneurysm. Having a TPM at Windows install usually prompts the system to activate bitlocker. Bitlocker itself isn't bad, but it's fucking terrible when windows does this shit and doesn't really inform the user about it. Nobody knows that they need to back up their goddamned bitlocker recovery keys, so inevitably, when something goes wrong (we're talking about Windows here, something will go wrong) and the system stops booting, you need the fucking bitlocker recovery key to do anything. Your option, if you can call it that, if you can't get the recovery key, is to format all of your shit, and reinstall from scratch. I know several people who have lost a lot of work and irreplaceable files, like pictures, because bitlocker fucked them over and they had no idea it was even running.
Sorry about your loss, but all those family photos you saved that don't exist anywhere else are locked behind basically uncrackable encryption, get fucked, I guess.
I'm going to cut this rant off. Needless to say I'm pretty tired of Microsoft's bullshit. Make an operating system. That's what people want. That's it. We shouldn't need "debloat" scripts to fix your nonsense. Gah.
I recently had to reinstall windows on a coworker's laptop because it wouldn't boot (hard drive is probably failing). I couldn't even format the drive because bitlocker was bit locking and the only way to turn it off is through the control panel (again, PC would not boot). I ended up having to delete the entire partition so I could reformat and install.
I usually do that anyways. As soon as it's like, "which partition do you want to install to?" I'm like, nope! And delete all the partitions. Just install to the drive.
The windows installer is so retarded with this kind of thing that I make it basically impossible to do wrong. If I have another drive in the system, I unplug it before I install windows, then plug it back in after windows is installed. I want it to see one drive and only one drive and I want it to install to that drive and nothing else. Not a partition, not a specific location, just the drive.
Windows is in a permanent state of shitification, it feels to be like they have sales driving development. Every year Windows applications make more and more stupid fucking decisions with how stuff functions. You can't target a specific folder to save a word doc without 5 clicks to get to the fucking file explorer. You now left click to fix spelling instead of right click in outlook. None of this shit makes sense. They keep fucking around with how stuff operates for seemingly no rhyme or reason and all it's doing is pissing off seasoned users. I know the devs aren't this fucking brain dead which is how I get to "sales must be driving" mentality. Because sales people tend the be the worst fucking people to make decisions on shit,they're good at charming people, they should stick to that.
I could not give any fucks if they want to cram this shit into the crap home version. I don't use it and anyone who does, probably would rather have a more inexpensive version that's been subsidized by all the crap they've piled into the OS. Sure. Whatever.
But this crap is present in the professional, and enterprise versions, this shit still persists. Like, these are versions that are twice or three times as expensive and still, full of shit; just as bad as the cheap home version.
Unacceptable.
The constant stupid UI changes are just icing on this shit filled cake. Why are we moving everything around? Sure, you want to create a less "ugly" control panel, ok that's fine, but why the fuck did you make it borderline impossible to do something as simple as change your network IP address? I don't even try anymore, I just go find the og control panel and load up network and sharing center or something. If you're going to change it, at least make it as functional as the old one, or don't fucking do it at all.
I went back from Windows 11 to Windows 10 as 11 was too buggy on my system (maybe because I bypassed some checks for TPM because my motherboard was too old).
I cannot understand at all this move from control panel to settings thats half baked in 10 and presumably even worse in 11. It’s not an improvement and makes things difficult to find
The only improvement I can find with the windows 11 settings is account administration. Linking to a Microsoft account or adding authentication methods or something, is pretty decent. Everything else, just makes me want to tear my head off of my body and throw it across the room.
I'm gonna upgrade my setup at some point, so thanks for this. I didn't realize they had some bullshit like bitlocker in there, definitely going to disable that because I cannot lose some files.
I try to speak the gospel of backing up your bitlocker recovery key to anyone who will listen without their eyes glazing over.
You can turn it off, if you're okay with going without encryption; if it's a mobile computer, like a laptop or something, encryption is a good idea, so just back up the key in a safe place, even just emailing it to yourself and you're all set.
The bullshit is that the bitlocker dialog won't save a file that contains your recovery key, to the drive that's encrypted; my recommendation is to "print" it to a PDF, which you can save anywhere you want. Once you have it, attach it to an email and send it to yourself, or toss it in your Google drive or whatever.
Full disk encryption is, IMO, a great thing to have, but to rugpull people by just enabling it and not giving them the information to secure access to their data, or even really inform them that it's on, is complete fucking horse shit.
I don't know how much I'll need it on a desktop that's strictly used by me, but I see your point nevertheless. The fact that its turned on by default without user knowledge and that the key is not automatically safely accessible is... That is a whole other level of dogshit, that's just insane honestly. I'd definitely save it to drive and a stick to be sure, that's a good one.
I agree, there's pretty limited usefulness to keep it enabled on a desktop. Unless you're at risk of someone walking off with it, like your desktop is in a fairly public area, or you live in an area where robberies/burglaries are not rare, I don't know that there's much value in it. You also have to think about what data you're realistically keeping on your PC. Is it something that if that were to become public information, would that be a problem?
Like, if you have pictures of yourself in blackface or nudes or something, maybe think about it... But if you're just using your PC to play games and browse the web, it's probably not very important to encrypt it. Even if someone takes it and looks through all your data, they probably won't find anything of value (to someone else) beyond whatever money they can get for the hardware.
It's a very personal choice, and with higher risk devices like laptops, I would say, just turn on the FDE, back up the recovery keys and forget about it. Desktops, meh. Up to you.
Idk if you love or hate windows but I hope your job switches to linux for your sanity lol I would be going crazy. Just reading your rant gave me anxiety
I appreciate that. I don't think my users would tolerate Linux. Maybe MacOS, but I would quit if that happened.
Windows has some very terrible traits, but it's something I've worked with and on for the last ~20 years. I see all the warts. I have no delusions about it, but it's something I know extremely well as a result.
I like how the settings for daylight savings just fucking disappeared on my kid's laptop and I had to edit the registry to get the setting to show up and correct the time.
Oh. I have one for this. I support people from several timezones, so to help myself, I set up a couple of additional clocks in Windows, so I could keep track of what time it is for the user, since most people are bad at thinking outside of their local timezone.
Well, I'm in a timezone that uses DST, and when it started for my timezone this year, all of my clocks changed. Every last one of them are now wrong, since the actual timezones they are for don't do DST.
I recently moved my media PC to Linux Mint. I had Bluetooth issues with windows despite my hardware not that old and 'Windows 11 ready'. Zero problems on Linux. I play the same games thanks to Steam Proton library. I use Mac for work. So I finally did it. No more Windows. I tried to switch 5 years ago. But today Linux is polished. And mostly works as expected. You still need to open terminal a few times to change some settings. I'm happy. Highly recommended.
I switched recently to Nobara after having a great experience with my steam deck. However, I'll probably add windows as a dual boot option since CS2 doesn't run properly (like 16fps..).
I dont have CS2 because, well, the obvious reasons. But I do have the original Skylines, and its linux version is also a festering pile of rancid dogshit.
Running the windows version via proton made it run smooth, stable (well, as stable as can be expected with a few hundred mods..lol), and without headache.
so yeah, install windows version and use proton. Overall better experience probably.
Honestly, i think thats my advice about gaming on linux in general, to generally avoid the native version. Personally, I've only run into two games that the native version wasnt shit, and that was Stardew Valley and Rimworld.
I tried to get nobara to run a few times but sth was always broken.
I'm now on Bazzite after testing Linux Mint a few months.
Bazzite seems to be the more polished fedora based gaming distro.
I'll have a look into that. For work I use Mint and really like it, however wanted to have a gaming distro that already delivers everything that I need and since I already used ProtonGE it was a natural choice for me. But i already had some issues with it probably due to NVidia drivers. Seems to be better now with the latest kernel
I think I get slightly better performance on Bazzite than on mint. Mint e.g. still has the 535 Nvidia drivers as recommended (we're at 550 now).
On Bazzite you'll probably have to enable x11 until the new update with explicit sync drops mid May. (At least I had a ton of flickering on Wayland with my rtx 3060)
Using Bazzite, myself. I have a weird issue with rebooting, though. Tends to freeze at the boot screen (grub doesn't show up at all) then the whole boot/login process becomes a slideshow. This doesn't happen if I manually turn my PC off and turn it on, though. Really odd problem that I haven't had on other distros.
Automatic screen lock and auto-sleep get disabled everytime I install a KDE DE. I could take a closer look at energy savings, but I don't think there's much else I can do there. I know it's not hardware-related, as this doesn't happen with any other distro. May be an issue with KDE 6, for all I know. Gonna have to look into it more when I get home from work.
I had a lot of crashes as soon as I installed it. Must have been some driver/hardware issues probably.
I'm not knowledgeable enough (and frankly had no energy to troubleshoot) I just installed mint which ran without (much) trouble.
I was interested in a more up to date system and KDE plasma as well as pipewire already integrated and looked at bazzite (after another unsuccessful try at nobara) - have been t running it for a few weeks now and I'm perfectly happy with it. CS 2 also runs without problems - but I mainly cast matches instead of playing myself.
I just got a steam deck, and needed to install FF14 (non steam) so I was mucking around in desktop mode… yeah. I’ll prob be getting a spare drive for my tower now to try out Linux. I’d love nothing more then to cut ties to windows.
I switched from Win10 to Arch and now I do have problems with bluetooth, because my mouse officially only supports Windows. Think I will just force my mouse to support Arch (or the other way around). Still way better and faster than Windows.
This one should work via bluetooth, some pages online indicate so, and it would be very rare that a bluetooth mouse does not work on linux.
And it should absolutely work via the little usb dongle that came with the mouse, as for example my logitech wireless mouse even works in my uefi/bios with the usb receiver.
I may yet try it in the next few years. I think one large frustration I anticipate (among others) is keyboard shortcuts. I've become very experienced with those on Windows, and my brief efforts at Linux (eg, on my Steam Deck's monitor hookup) have not come across enough matches for them.
I can absolutely see value in enduring the pain of a large switch though.
Linux mint keyboard shortcuts mimic those of windows tho, Linux mint is the best choice for windows refugees, this is one of the things majority of Linux community is agree about. Edit: in Linux mint you also can change keyboard shortcuts with gui tools already pre installed
Funny, one of my longstanding frustrations with windows was that I didn’t get a say in my keyboard shortcuts. Namely the fact that the shortcut to swap keyboard layouts has historically been very easy to accidentally hit.
As someone who uses all 3 (work-issue MBP, personal dev laptop on fedora 40, overbuilt gaming-oriented desktop on w10 with a dual boot Ubuntu partition I haven’t used in ages because WSL lets me do what I need to most of the time), it’s really not that bad. Then again, I’ve had a trifecta like that for well over a decade at this point, so maybe I’ve just fully acclimatized to switching machines and OSes for different primary activities all the time.
If you ever do switch I suggest something with KDE, I love keyboard shortcuts and I find anything other(Windows the most) extremely lacking in that field.
Yeah in college I tried to switch for nerd cred and it sucked, but over the past year I switched and while I’ve had some hiccups, I honestly think it’s more a result of me going with an arch based distro than a Debian one. I’m thinking I may hop soon, but I assume it’ll be a massive pain
Whenever I try switching to Linux, there is always something that doesn't work right and takes forever to finagle with to fix if it's even possible. I'm primarily a Linux Mint fan (daily drove it on my aging desktop until it died of old age a few years back), but I've also dabbled in a few other noob-friendly distros like Ubuntu (was really into it when everything was still orange and brown lol) and Pop OS.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love using Linux to breathe new life into older systems, but it just isn't a good option for me personally if my device hasn't gotten sluggish yet.
As an example, I have an aging laptop that started blue screening a bunch. It doesn't support the Win 11 upgrade due to it's processor not meeting minimum specs. So I thought it was finally time to see if Linux would improve it.
First of all, I had a hell of a time installing various distros without having them boot to a black screen after installation completes. Took absolutely forever to finally sus this out on the various distros I tried. Then I find that the couple extra buttons on my basic Logitech mouse don't work. These are essential buttons for me that I use constantly. I go through a million troubleshooting steps before finding out that it's a Wayland issue, so I switch back to Xorg and everything is cool. But then I start running into lag issues which never occurred on my Windows install. I also tried playing some games I had in my Epic Games library. I could not for the life of me get it to work, no matter which platform I tried. I get that Steam has better Linux compatibility, but not all of us have all of our games on Steam.
Finally got tired of the whole ordeal and switched back to Windows. Did a bit more troubleshooting and seemed to have resolved the blue screen issues and now it seems to work perfectly and much better out of the box than Linux. It's not an old enough device a Linux refresh to be worth it yet.
I get that Lemmings are die hard Linux fans, and I think Linux has some fantastic use cases...but for many users it actually isn't a good alternative. I find it works best when you want to breathe new life into older hardware or if you have every component specifically built to work for a particular Linux distro. But when basic features don't work properly without hours of troubleshooting (if you can ever get them to work at all), it's a little hard to just recommend it to your average Joe whose Windows/Mac computer works just fine.
This "everything just works" Linux experience a lot of people talk about on Lemmy/Reddit has absolutely never been my experience, even though I've been a casual Linux fan for over a decade now. Meanwhile, I've had the opposite experience with Windows (unless you're talking really old Windows versions like Win XP and older).
This. I have dabbled with various Linux distros over the past 15+ years out of curiosity. I have, without fail, had to spend days troubleshooting and fixing various problems of all kinds. Sometimes it was WiFi drivers, sometimes it was GPU drivers, sometimes it was power management issues, and most recently it's soundcard drivers and poor audio control/quality issues. I always installed Linux as dual-boot so I had my normal Windows install to fall back on but I just couldn't see myself able to fully switch primary OS over.
Nowadays I couldn't switch over even if I wanted to because numerous programs I use for my work are not supported properly or at all. Linux has indeed come a long way over the years in terms of UX and software compatibility, but not everyone uses their computer just for games. There is a lot of creative and productivity software (and devices!) that have limited or zero Linux support and many FOSS alternatives are not sufficient. I hate Adobe as much as the next person and Photoshop is a bloated pile of trash, but part of my soul dies whenever a Linux fan tells me I can just replace Photoshop with GIMP. GIMP is clownware.
Another major issue I had was the community itself. When troubleshooting the issues I've had over the years, one big problem that kept popping back up was how toxic and condescending the Linux community can be. On more than a few occasions my requests for help on forums were met with passive aggressiveness and hostility because I "should have known better" or something along those lines. The most recent example I can think of was someone asking me to post a debug log to troubleshoot an issue I had and I had to ask him where to find the log. He told me the folder it would be in but not the folder path to get there. When I asked again where to find the log, he just told me that "maybe Linux isn't for you".
You know what? Maybe it isn't. It sure isn't for most people and I can't see that changing soon.
Another major issue I had was the community itself. When troubleshooting the issues I’ve had over the years, one big problem that kept popping back up was how toxic and condescending the Linux community can be. On more than a few occasions my requests for help on forums were met with passive aggressiveness and hostility because I “should have known better” or something along those lines. The most recent example I can think of was someone asking me to post a debug log to troubleshoot an issue I had and I had to ask him where to find the log. He told me the folder it would be in but not the folder path to get there. When I asked again where to find the log, he just told me that “maybe Linux isn’t for you”.
I had almost exactly this same issue years ago when I tried Mint. I was trying to get something to work (I think install games on Steam? Something like that) and it would just do nothing, no message, etc. When I asked for help, I was told "This is super obvious" and after trying their suggestions and having them all fail, was told "just go back to windows."
Ok, done?
(It also doesn't help that there is a huge difference between 'you can use the terminal' and 'you have to use the terminal.' I'm an 80's kid, I grew up with DOS, so I understand how to navigate terminals, I just don't want to constantly.)
I've had similar experiences. Never posted questions myself, but I'll be Googling for help and find forum posts that are as toxic as you describe.
It's been bad enough that the Linux elitism on Lemmy leaves a bad taste, even if I haven't seen as much of the toxic parts here. I know I'm not the only person of my friends group that feels this way about Lemmy's Linux crowd.
I've been exclusively Linux for years, and all the crap now going on with AI and ads being shoved into literally everything makes me happier than ever with that decision.
But you're absolutely right. Linux is "it just works" in a relatively narrow use-case.
Just going on the internet to browse and play some Facebook games (my parents). It'll absolutely work out of the box.
Doing some light creative work (design, writing, etc...) No tinkering needed.
But from there it becomes a scale from "probably work fine" to "hours of work and extra repositories needed".
Video editing or 3D modelling with an NVIDIA card because CUDA, it SHOULD be easy to install, but there's a chance it won't be. You take your chances.
Gaming through proton? Single player games, yeah. I've literally had 95% work out of the box because Valve is awesome. But I don't play online multiplayer. If you need to play nice with anticheat software, good luck.
I too get frustrated with the fundamentalist Linux base who think its the right fit for everyone. Because it absolutely is not, and its okay to admit that because admitting that drives the motivation to improve it.
I don't think Linux is for aging hardware. It just depends of your needs. Linux support all mainstream hardware, I guess. Never had any problems with something not working on Linux. I remember many years ago I had a scanner, which used to work only with Win XP or Vista because of outdated drivers. Windows 7 was too modern for it. I tried it with Linux and it worked. Now I have some random-hardware PC, everything works. It's Intel Core 11400 hardware, AMD RX-GPU, quite modern. I think problems could be on laptops with display backlight, sleep mode or something else. Desktop PC's should be good. Even if you have last-gen hardware, just use the latest kernel. I haven't heard about Linux build hardware. It used to be a thing for Hackintosh builds.
My previous company HP laptop worked better on Linux, it wasn't that hot all the time. Because Linux was consuming less system resources. My work: Browser + IDE. I had dual-boot Win10 and Ubuntu. Ended up with Windows because of Pulse Secure crap and some specific network restrictions. It was years back.
I remember I gave up with Ubuntu 5 years ago at home because after system update It just failed to boot. I didn't touch anything. I don't know if it's possible today. And Proton wasn't here and I wanted to play games. I remember I was using Lightroom, but for my very basic photographer needs Darktable works perfectly. And it's free!
All you need is basic troubleshooting skills. You need to google sometimes. I know that it could be an issue. Linux not for everyone. And it's fine. It's good to have a chose. Linux gives that choice.
To comment on the first paragraph, that is just a skill issue. Before I switched to Linux I was pretty adept at Windows, but some things are hard to figure out because it's hidden behind layers of bullshit. Running commands that obscure what exactly they're doing, just because some guy on some forum said it worked for him, is how you get around on Windows and that knowledge is something you build over many years. Knowing where specific settings are or what values to use takes time. The same counts for Linux. If you stick to it, that knowledge will come with experience.
Just remember the dism and sfc scannows, registry hacks etc the average Joe doesn't know about. Your learnt it, you didn't start using Windows with that knowledge. The same will happen with Linux.
Windows just sucks at handling Bluetooth. It's ridiculous that you can't change audio codecs, or choose between handsfree and high quality audio. You have to let windows guess at both
I did that and it was a mess, with warnings about being unable to backup that I couldn't get rid of. I had to reinstall to try to turn off syncing, then remove again. But it's so integrated that my desktop is still under a OneDrive subfolder and it's still referenced in various places.
Is there a guide to completely removing this from Windows 11 cleanly?
You can disable so-called essential components and I believe it ships without almost any of the bloat. So essentially you could just take one drive out, or not have it in the first place. Or at least that's my hope
For me? Recall. I'm ordering an SSD to dual boot Linux off of and ween myself off Windows as much as I can. Probably can't remove it as long as I want to play games* with friends, but I'd be happy to have my day to day be less awful.
* Before anyone says Proton, Wine, etc, I mean the awful multiplayer rootkits like Valorant.
I was in the same boat, I have a dual boot main machine now but I haven't booted I to windows since I installed Pop!OS, I've been mostly just seeing what alternatives to everything so far, especially photo stuff, but I seem to be pretty settled now after messing with popos on a little thin client and little second pc I keep at work
I started dual booting to Arch Linux and more often than not I boot more now into Linux than Windows 11. I've used Windows since 3.11. Microsoft really have fucked Windows recently.
Windows updates used to be seen as upgrades. I remember getting Win95 to run on my 386 with 8MB of RAM (which my buddy said wouldn't be able to handle it). I was so stoked to have it working because 95 had so many improvements over 3.1. Of course each release had its issues but after some service packs they were usually pretty good.
Maybe it started with Windows ME, but it definitely was in full effect by Vista, where new releases became downgrades. XP was the last great version, when I had to move on from that everything started getting much worse UX-wise.
The issue can be resolved by allocating an additional 250 MB of storage space to the recovery partition. Details on how to do that can be found here.
However, at least on Windows 10, Microsoft has acknowledged that an automatic resolution for this issue will not be released and as such, the only way to fix this is manually.
So there is a solution and the headline should be "Microsoft admits it can't automatically fix..."
Letting the installer autonomously adjust the recovery partition may open up vulnerabilities where malicious software can be placed in recovery. I don't know how accurate that is, but it makes sense to me, and would be why they want it done on a case by case basis as needed and not just a mass fix to all installs whether they need it or not.
Would you like automatic update to mess with your disk partition allocations without requesting explicit permission to do so? As long as searching the error code would give me the explanation and solution I'm Ok with manual fix this time
Me no, but for most users with only windows installed and not dual booting, having it automatically doing it would probably be fine and bailing out when it detects a more advance configuration such as extra partitions would make sense. Then display a message about manual intervention is required or something.
That was my thought. I'm not sure if it's based in science, but I remember being a huge fan of Windows 2000 back in the day, and Microsoft pushed a final service pack that made it highly unstable in 2005, and refused to update/fix it. My theory was that they were trying to push everyone to Windows XP, but I'm prone to thinking the worst of large corporations.
TWO of my laptops were bit by that bug/error. Not one. Two.
But what they offered was not a real solution. I'm an experienced computer user, and still didn't wanna mess with that "solution".
This was done just to force people to upgrade to a Win11 (and maybe get a new PC too, if their old one couldn't run Win11). If not that, then simply, incompetence in general.
One issue is that some people are still on windows 7 installs that were upgraded. Windows 7 had a large enough partition for then, but the upgrade now needs more. Unfortunately 2009 Microsoft didn't anticipate that this should be bigger for 2023 installs. Making it larger is a hassle I wouldn't want to code either.
In civilized countries there is an understanding that noone is reading dozens of pages of terms of agreement, so any clause in there that is unexpected is automatically void. Expecting a software agreement to include rules not to distribute it further, break copy protection mechanisms etc. is normal so those terms are valid. But having all your data stolen is not something to be expected, hence invalid.
Try going with that argument to court and see what happens. In USA basically anything goes, whatever is written in there. No matter how weird or against the user. There's a reason why EU's pushing new and shorter terms than can be glanced and read easily.
Whoever is downvoting this needs to have an encounter with the U.S. legal system, so they find out how little their precious freaking "rights" are worth.
Yup. But this is Lemmy. People are emotional rather than rational.
Edit: Here's a video I linked in my other comment where Ross is talking about USA law and terms and conditions when it comes to games. He's trying to get publishers to stop killing games once they are out. He basically consulted two lawyers and they both give up on that. It's so atrocious that it's not a matter for law, but constitution.
IANAL and could be wrong, but it is not the case that the T’s&C’s we all have to agree to aren’t necessarily legally binding, because people can’t be expected to read and understand them all.
With that in mind, it doesn’t matter what the user agrees to if they have no practical alternative available to them.
There's actually no speculation on this one. There's a fight going on led by Ross Scott of Accursed Farms against shutting down game servers when game requires always online access. Basically lawyers have checked the law in this instance and in USA terms and conditions are GOD. You accepted it and you live with it. Here's the video. I recommend watching that section of video.
Microsoft is, you have noticed, not from UK. Although I wonder how that will play out. They did move around their company for tax evasion. I think latest was Ireland, then again I think they were smart enough for money to go one side and software to be released by other. It's a complex matter. EU has been able to reign them in somewhat with stupidly high punishments with GDPR. Then again, you are no longer part of that.
Microsoft can only operate as a franchise overseas. You know this thing called trade law in other countries. Contrary to popular American belief, they are not the center of the world
The c-levels are really sick of all these new features they're adding and no one is using them because of silly reasons like "they don't work good" or "I can't even see the point of this for me".
In their wisdom, they've taken the option to say no away from the users. Now they have a much easier time justifying their bonus this year, just look at how many users are using their new features!
Yeah they’ll take that bonus and then dip to another company and get a big resignation party and golden parachute while the rest of us stare in amazement
somebody who has worked at these types of companies
Begging people to subscribe to their own hardware will have increased results when they can show you your OneDrive is full. It probably will get them more money than it loses them. They are utterly thirsty for subscription revenue.
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